Every crafting recipe works once per world, and nobody tells you
First and Last is a plugin for Minecraft servers, which means it installs on the server and you join with a normal, unmodified game. It changes one rule: every crafting recipe works once per world. Not once per player, once ever, for everyone. The second time anyone tries to craft a stone pickaxe, the result slot simply stays empty, with no message and no sound, and the recipe quietly leaves your recipe book.
The first hour feels exactly like Minecraft, which is the trap. Then your stone pickaxe breaks, you lay out the cobblestone and sticks, and the result slot does nothing. No red text, no error, no sound. You check the grid twice. You open the recipe book and it is a little thinner than you remember. From that moment on, every craft is a decision: not whether you can afford the materials, but whether this is the moment your world spends the recipe. People start hoarding blaze powder for weeks before daring to open the Eye of Ender session.
One ledger shared by the whole server: someone must decide who spends the pickaxe recipe
New to this mod? Do these in order and you will have seen the point of it.
The unit of once is a session, not a click. From your first successful craft of a recipe until you close the crafting inventory or log out, you can keep crafting it: load the grid, shift-click, top it up. When the inventory closes, the recipe is spent forever, for everyone on the server. This single rule is what keeps the game finishable.
Only crafting-grid recipes are gated: the crafting table and the inventory 2x2. Smelting, smoking, blasting, campfires, stonecutting, smithing and brewing are never touched, and neither are loot, villager trades, fishing or mob drops. Furnaces work metal, the stonecutter cuts. The world keeps producing; only your hands are limited.
Fireworks, armour dyeing, banner and map and book copying, shulker colouring, tipped arrows, suspicious stew, shield decoration and grid repair are exempt on purpose: one firework ever would end elytra travel, and the second banner you dye is technically a different recipe, which is not a rule anyone can play against. Two mechanisms keep them safe: anything the server reports as a complex recipe is exempt structurally, plus a regex list in the config for datapack and plugin recipes.
A crafter block would craft a recipe forever without ever closing an inventory, so crafters may only craft exempt recipes; anything else silently produces nothing. Re-unlocking a spent recipe in the recipe book, say by picking up its ingredient, is cancelled, and spent recipes are re-hidden on every join. And the result of a craft is re-checked against the ledger at the moment you take it, so two players cannot both spend the last copy of the same recipe.
No chat messages, no titles, no sounds, no particles. The plugin never announces anything to anybody. The only feedback is the world itself: an empty result slot and a recipe book that has quietly shrunk. The /firstandlast command talks, but only to whoever typed it, and it exists for the operator, not the player.
Spent recipes live in plugins/FirstAndLast/spent.txt, one key per line, written atomically on every spend. The scope is the server installation, not the world folder: one challenge, shared by everyone, and swapping the world does not reset it. Admins get /fal status, /fal list, /fal restore, /fal reset confirm and /fal reload.
Flavour, not rules. None of this changes how the mod behaves.
Furnaces work metal. Stonecutters cut. Villagers trade and the world goes on dropping loot, because production is not the thing that ran out. What ran out is invention. Every recipe is an idea, and in this world an idea can only be had once. After that, the grid remembers that it has already been done, and it sees no reason to do it again.
Nobody announces anything. The recipe book just gets shorter, entry by entry, like a library being quietly emptied one volume at a time. You find out the way you find out anything here: by noticing.
No. It is a Paper server plugin: it goes in the server's plugins folder and completely vanilla clients join normally. Nobody installs a mod.
Yes, by design. Once is a crafting session, not a click, so your single Eye of Ender session can produce a whole stack if you stockpile pearls and blaze powder first. Fireworks are exempt, so elytra travel survives too.
Lean on everything that is never gated: furnaces, the stonecutter, smithing, brewing, villager trades, fishing, loot chests and mob drops. Sticks come from leaf decay, dead bushes, witches and fishing junk, and each wood type's plank recipe is its own separate recipe.
Delete plugins/FirstAndLast/spent.txt or run /fal reset confirm. Making a new world on the same server is not enough, because the ledger belongs to the server, not the world.
Paper 1.21.1 and its forks (Purpur, Pufferfish). Spigot is untested because the plugin uses Paper-only API for the crafter guard. It is not a mod, so there is no Forge or Fabric version.
Status: The jar compiles and the author has tested it himself, but it has not had a real playtest yet.
.jar file into your mods folder.This wiki documents the mods; it does
not host them. Builds live in the project's own repository under
mc-first-and-last/build/libs/.
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